The Details

Typically, 60% of the chlorine that most people absorb daily comes from showering or bathing in chlorinated water. Chlorine damages your hair and skin — you can read about the hazards of showering in chlorinated water here. Bath water also contains things like heavy metals and VOCs (volitive organic compounds). Ideally, all these things should all be filtered out.

Vitamin C Tablets or Powder

Vitamin C tablets or Vitamin C powder will remove 99% of free chlorine and 99% of chloramines from shower water. Chloramine or NH2Cl (a combination of chlorine and ammonia) is now commonly being used in place of chlorine for disinfection, but chloramine is not easily removed from water. However, Vitamin C can neutralize 99% of the chloramines from water. To back this up, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission now states on their website that only Vitamin C can be used to remove chlormaines from municipal water. Here is the quote from the Commission:

Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) has recently been included in AWWA Standard (AWWA, 2005b) as one of the methods for dechlorination of disinfected water mains. SFPUC and other utilities have used Vitamin C for dechlorination prior to environmental discharges of chlorinated and chloraminated water. Since ascorbic acid is weakly acidic, the pH of water may decrease slightly (Tikkanen et al., 2001). Ascorbic acid has been used for a long time as one of the dechlorinating agents for preservation of chlorinated or chloraminated water samples for laboratory analysis.

Vitamin C tablets are slight more convenient since the some in measured amounts (tablets) and they also “fizz” to release the Vitamin C. However, Vitamin C powder is quite a bit less expensive overall.

One More Option

If you have a showerhead incorporated in your bath, you can make use of my recommend shower filters (a VitaMax Vitamin C In-Line Filter together with a Sprite HOB-CM Brass Shower Filter), and use your shower to fill your bath. However, it does take longer to fill your bath, and you’ll lose some heat from the water and it falls from the showerhead.